Marcus Theatres announced this week that they are now offering reserved seating in every auditorium at Marcus North Shore Cinemas in Mequon, Wisconsin. This service is available at no additional cost, which is an added bonus.

To reserve your seats, all you need to do is purchase your tickets online (just click on the showtimes for the theater on their Showtimes page) and you can select your tickets by following the prompts on the movietickets.com web site (our partner for electronic ticketing). Keep in mind that there is still the traditional $1.00 convenience fee for online ticketing that has always been added onto the price of the ticket.

Reserved seating makes it possible for you to know exactly where you're going to sit ahead of time, so you can relax on your way to the theater and even take in a pizza in the on-site Zaffiro's, but there are also some tradeoffs to it.

For example, the fact that all the seats are reserved means that it's almost imperative to buy your tickets in advance. If you don't, you could show up plenty early, and still end up sitting in bad seats because someone reserved the ones you would have chosen if there were no reserved seats.

It also requires you to have a good understanding of the layout of each auditorium, so you don't end up picking bad seats by mistake. If you get into the theater and you aren't happy with your seats, are they going to let you change your seat assignments? Imagine trying to do that on a busy Friday night...

There are sure to be some kinks to be worked out of their system, and some trial and error experimentation on the part of movie patrons, but I think it's possible for this to be a good thing in the end.

What Do You Think? Have You Experienced This for Yourself?

What do you think about theaters going to all-reserved seating? Have you gone to Marcus North Shore Cinema since the change?

Reader Comments

Please Note: These comments are submitted by the readers of The BigScreen Cinema Guide and represent their own personal opinions, and do not represent the views of The BigScreen Cinema Guide, or any of its associated entities.

May 10, 2011 - BigScreen Reader

If they're going to have reserved seating for all seats, then we're going to need to see seating charts so that we can get an idea of where the good seats are!

May 10, 2011 - BigScreen Reader

Who's going to enforce the seating?

Are there going to be extra ushers to handle the situation when someone is sitting in your reserved seat, or am I going to have to go out to the concession stand and track someone down?

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